I7 920 vs Phenom II 965 with an ATI 5870.(Finally!)

[yannifb]

He was referring to the fact that the i7 920 is a more elite chip because, in everything outside of gaming, it is untouched. I see your point, but I think it was a sound conclusion just not explained well.

Yeah I guess but he really should have specified since the review is only about gaming.

 

[AMW1011]

Yeah I guess but he really should have specified since the review is only about gaming.

Agreed.

 

[smithereen]

Holy expletive Batman... are these results consistent elsewhere?

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

I think since ATI released its MT drivers, they are

 

[jennyh]

It's not really a 'win' when it's only 1-2 fps, but for whatever reason it tends to be the phenom II coming out ahead at max settings, however slightly.

All I'm saying is the argument that was being used at the start of this thread - namely that the i7 would pull away with more powerful graphics cards - isn't showing up with the current most powerful card.

I dont believe it will happen with the next most powerful either.

 

[sincreator]

Well here is probally the best "quality article" i've come across yet anyway. Ph II/Core2/i7 at different clock speeds with single and crossfire 5870's: http://xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5870-cpu-scaling.html

I can see that "some" games really thrive with an i7 cpu, but I also see that most are about dead even. I also see that in alot of these games the overclocking on the cpu only makes a huge impact on a crossfire system for the most part.

 

[sincreator]

I think since ATI released its MT drivers, they are

What are these MT drivers you speak of? Where can I get them?

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Awhile back ATI released multithreaded drivers for their cards, which brought out nice improvements

 

[jimmysmitty]

What are these MT drivers you speak of? Where can I get them?

It was the 9.8 Cat drivers +. Basically they help to improve MT performance as well as multi GPU performance.

 

[Raidur]

Wow, scaling from 3 ghz on for the i7 is pitiful... a 2.0Ghz i7 and a 4.0 Ghz i7 had only about a 4fps difference most of the time. And for gods sake why the hell doesn't the writer realize that while a 2.6 ghz PII is equal to a 2.00 Ghz i7 in some tests (even though at 2.2ghz the PII is usually only 2-3 FPS behind) at 3.2 Ghz + a PII is equal to or better than a 4.0 Ghz i7 (most of the time). And the conclusion to the PII part really ticked me off, he said:
Even though the phenom II at 3.0 ghz and up performed greater or equal to an i7 at similar speeds, we doubt someone would pair a $600 gfx card with a budget cpu.

WTH!!!!?? So even though performance is exactly the same or better than the i7's at high clocks, the PII isn't a high end chip just because its not overpriced?

Reviewers have gone downhill... they think no one is smart enough to look at the graphs...

Would you consider a Q6600 or Core2Duo (E8400+) high end? Those perform like i7/c2q45nm/phII in games when you pass 3.4ghz.

Another thing. You have this scaling issue all wrong... The reason i7 shows such a minimal increase between 2.0ghz and 4.0ghz is because the i7 only needs 2.xghz to run the gpu they were using to its full potential, not that the i7 has bad scaling. The fact that i7 shows such less of an increase over Phenom II actually gives a positive result towards intel. Check out some i7 synthetics at 4ghz+. That CPU is a monster.

I wish they would have done some lower resoution benchmarks so we can finally see the answer of if a stock Phenom II will bottleneck a 5970. At 25x15 of course the GPU bottleneck will still be present. I see that benchmark almost no different than a 5870 on 1920x1200.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

This is true, but for average Joe, those AMD chips come clocked much higher at stock.
For average Joe, AMD does present a great choice for gaming

 

[Raidur]

This is true, but for average Joe, those AMD chips come clocked much higher at stock.
For average Joe, AMD does present a great choice for gaming

Very true, and I don't doubt that at all. For the average gamer the Phenom II X4 is even 'more' than enough most of the time.

Honestly its hard for me to recommend anything else with the 955 at $165... Unless they have a pretty large budget.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

I think i7 is designed well, and gets the most out of apps most the time from its ability.
When it fails to do so, we see a tailing off of perf, and that too is expected, esp if HT is on, and not effecting whats its designed to do, and only causes greater latencies.
Were going to have to get used to this until our SW, including games catch up, as AMDs solution will be slightly better at HT, but will also suffer from its "use" when not effective.
The trade offs created for HT demand this, as well as turbo, because trying to do more in redundancy turns into less overall when not applicable.
Once SW becomes more "thread" friendly, this will only turn into positives all around.
Im still somewhat disappointed by i7s overall perf, as I was hoping for even more IPC, but I cant knocw it for being better anyways, and even somewhat ahead of its time, which is what we all want, something to push the bubble.
Just as going to a apu type or fusion type of computing will change the landscape as we knew it, i7 too has done a lil of this, with more to come down the road, in better iterations, and certainly SW

 

[yannifb]

Well imo the main benefit of the i7 is that you can say it got SMT popular again, which I believe is the right way to go.

 

[Guest]

dont wanna be considered as a fanboy or smt but here is my 2 cents...

1) Upgradeability

how many ppl think AMD is gonna release an upgrade for AM3 socket that will give more performance? ooorrr are they planing on going for a newer soceket type?


2) Choice of games

all the games that were chosen there are very much GPU bound games. see what happens when u play ANNO , Supreme Commander or even HoI 3...(my q6600 goes nuts when germany starts its blitz to russia.)

 

[sincreator]

I already posted this link, but nobody even commented. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5870-cpu-scaling.html At least xbit tested a ton of games to base the decision on.

 

[jennyh]

I already posted this link, but nobody even commented. http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5870-cpu-scaling.html At least xbit tested a ton of games to base the decision on.

That link has been commented on loads of times in other threads.

The concensus of opinion is that xbit used a very underpowered AMD system and that the results should be pretty much ignored.

 

[sincreator]

That link has been commented on loads of times in other threads.

The concensus of opinion is that xbit used a very underpowered AMD system and that the results should be pretty much ignored.

How was it under powered? If you make a statement like that, how bout giving an explanation. All 3 cpu's tested were tested at 3 different clockspeeds across all the games.Core2/i7/Ph II.

Quoted from the article:
I want to note that I did not deliberately slow down the AMD platform. I only tried to overclock it as best as I could with the components at hand. Running a little ahead, I must confess that my tests did not reveal any slowing down.


EDIT: Actually, after re-reading this article I see your point. Maybe they need to revisit these tests once they are using DDR-3 and a 790fx motherboard. Still, I didn't really think that the 8x link and ram would of made that big a difference. I kinda figured that the 8x Crossfire link would of only affected the 5970, not the 5870.

 

[jennyh]

Well you can read the comments on the article for a more full explanation.

Basically though, the motherboard was a very poor choice and the use of DDR2 memory hurt it further.

http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=869

Almost identical system specs, completely different results.

 

[Mandrake_]

How was it under powered? If you make a statement like that, how bout giving an explanation. All 3 cpu's tested were tested at 3 different clockspeeds across all the games.Core2/i7/Ph II.

Quoted from the article:
I want to note that I did not deliberately slow down the AMD platform. I only tried to overclock it as best as I could with the components at hand. Running a little ahead, I must confess that my tests did not reveal any slowing down.

AMD has true multi-core technology with megatasking platformance. That's why those results are clearly fabricated. Intel CPUs still have a bottleneck FSB architecture.

It is also highly deceptive to run a Core i7 at 4.1GHz since no retail CPUs like that can actually operate above 3.2GHz. AMDZONE did an unbiased test and found that.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dirt-2-performance-benchmark,2508-10.html

 

[OvrClkr]

AMD has true multi-core technology with megatasking platformance. That's why those results are clearly fabricated. Intel CPUs still have a bottleneck FSB architecture.

It is also highly deceptive to run a Core i7 at 4.1GHz since no retail CPUs like that can actually operate above 3.2GHz. AMDZONE did an unbiased test and found that.

since no retail CPUs like that can actually operate above 3.2GHz

not sure if I understood that one correctly .........

 

[sincreator]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/dirt-2-performance-benchmark,2508-10.html

ONE game that is more GPU dependant then CPU dependant. Wow, when reviews are done why do most sites use only 4/5 different games. I understand that this link was just for the Dirt 2 review, but it is still only one game. Atleast when xbitlabs reviews are done they use like 10-20 games to paint a full picture. Guru3d as well. Both Anandtech and Tom's have been doing this too much lately, hence all the fanboyism in the comments after. Atleast with a wider range of games tested, no-one can say they were doctored to make a certain manufacturer of GPU look better than the other.

I'm so sick of seeing 3/4 games out of 5 being games that favor Nvidia/ATI/Intel/AMD, and then being called an unbiased review by the site. In these cases I am starting to agree with the hate comments after the article. Which is kinda sad. Especially since some of the reviewers are starting to flame the readers comments just because the review didn't provide enough information, and they are getting called on it.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Its just 1 more piece of "controversial" fact.
Whats really being shown is, AMD and Intel hold their own for this game, and it comes down to price.
Showing minimal fps is of great service here, as it shows the cpu activity more in a game than highest do, since it eliminates the gpu factor somewhat.
Good article and read, again a thumbs up to Cleeve

 

[jennyh]

ONE game that is more GPU dependant then CPU dependant. Wow, when reviews are done why do most sites use only 4/5 different games. I understand that this link was just for the Dirt 2 review, but it is still only one game. Atleast when xbitlabs reviews are done they use like 10-20 games to paint a full picture. Guru3d as well.

Why do you keep ignoring the legionhardware results? Look at the test setup, both systems are practically identical. The xbitlabs article was horribly flawed.

The dirt 2 benches are just yet more proof that the i7 loses almost every time when the fps is below 60. That is what is important, not 150 fps vs 130 fps.